Badgerys Creek sets high-speed rail back 40 years

The approval of Sydney’s second airport at Badgerys Creek has set back the case for high-speed rail linking Melbourne and Brisbane by as much as 40 years, but proponents say governments should still work to ensure that the land corridor for the project is secured.

High-speed trains like those in China are still a long way off in Australia. AP

“The decision to go ahead with that has probably set back the case for high-speed rail on the east coast probably three of four decades.”

But he argued the project’s time would eventually come.

“We do need to be future proofing, and we haven’t been very good at it in this country, by and large,” Mr Hearsch said. “We do need to be getting on with our long-term planning.”

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Because the trains travel at more than 250km/h, track infrastructure needs to be carefully designed. Mr Hearsch said curves, for example, were usually built across seven to 10 kilometres.

Danny Broad, chief executive of the Australasian Railway Association, said this underlined the imperative of securing the land corridor on which the high-speed rail track could eventually sit and warned this process alone could take up to 15 years.

“I think it’s still really important to lock away that corridor,” Mr Broad said. “The longer you leave it, the more and more tunnelling you need and prices go through the roof.”

“I think its fair to say the Coalition doesn’t share quite the same enthusiasm as that,” Mr Hearsch said.

But he said it was likely to take at least a decade to establish such an authority, even if it does return to the agenda.

Kirsty O’Connell, industry director of the Next Generation Engagement Program, said it was crucial for proponents of high-speed rail to build consensus and bipartisan support for projects.

“I think it will take every bit of [a decade] to build that alignment,” she said.

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“Rail is fortunate in that it has a slightly higher degree of latent social licence, but I don’t think you can take that for granted," she said.

Despite high-speed rail being put on the backburner, Mr Broad said Australia was in the middle of “a golden age of rail in terms of the investment that’s going into rail infrastructure and new rolling stock” with around $150 billion to be invested in the next 15 years.

This was being drive by population growth around the country but also the increasing role rail is playing in the freight sector, Mr Broad said.

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James Thomson is a Chanticleer columnist at The Australian Financial Review based in Melbourne. James was previously the Companies editor and the editor of BRW Magazine. Connect with James on Twitter. Email James at j.thomson@afr.com